Intel Axes All of 2017's U-Series Kaby Lake Refresh CPUs

Although they have only been around for just under three years, Intel is sending a handful of Kaby Lake-U Refresh CPUs off to early retirement. The chips in question are the 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U, i5-8350U, i7-8550U and i7-8650U.

Intel introduced these chips in August 2017, and they were among the first chips from Intel to bring four CPU cores to mobile platforms. This means that although they were a refresh of the 7th Generation Kaby Lake CPUs, they did offer significant performance increases over their previous-generation counterparts.

Despite a doubling of the core count, however, the chips kept the same TDP as their predecessors of 15W.

CPU

Cores/Threads

Base Clock

Turbo Frequency

Intel Core i5-8250U

4 / 8

1.60 GHz

3.40 GHz

Intel Core i5-8350U

4 / 8

1.70 GHz

3.60 GHz

Intel Core i7-8550U

4 / 8

1.80 GHz

4.00 GHz

Intel Core i7-8650U

4 / 8

1.90 GHz

4.20 GHz

All the aforementioned CPUs went into their discontinuance program as of yesterday. The final order date for the i7-8650U and i5-8350U's is October 23, 2020 with and a final shipment date of April 9, 2021. The i7-8550U and i5-8250U will see end-of-life slightly sooner on July 24, 2020 with a final shipment date of January 22, 2021.

Meanwhile, only two Kaby Lake-U Refresh processors remain on the market: the Pentium Gold 4417U and Celeron 3867U. However, Intel introduced these chips in 2019, so they still have some time to go before getting the axe.